Plan Text Thus the plan: The United States federal government should substantially increase its oceanic climate resiliency development to protect vulnerable populations. 1st – The United States federal government should increase its climate resiliency development - this can provide pathways out of poverty while preventing catastrophic harm
Center for American Progress, April 2014 [For citations and references, please see Michael Conathan, Jeffrey Buchanan, and Shiva Polefka, “The Economic Case for Restoring Coastal Ecosystems”(Washington: Center for American Progress and Oxfam America, 2014), available at http://ampr.gs/coastalrestoration. http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CoastalRestoration-factsheet.pdf]//
Healthy coastal ecosystems provide critical social and environmental benefits. While the existence of these benefits is not in dispute, estimating their economic value is challenging. Yet calculating these dollar values is crucial for the efficient management of coastal resources. The Center for American Progress and Oxfam America collaborated with researchers from Abt Associates to analyze the economic benefits provided by 3 of the 50 coastal restoration projects that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, funded with grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, of 2009. These three projects are located in the Seaside Bays of Virginia’s Atlantic coast; Mobile Bay, Alabama; and South San Francisco Bay, California. Previous research established that a $1 million investment in coastal restoration creates, on average, 17.1 jobs. 1 In comparison, offshore oil and gas development creates approximately 8.9 jobs per $1 million investment. 2 In low-income coastal communities, these restoration jobs can create significant pathways out of poverty. Although one of the sites yielded insufficient data to determine a reliable estimate, the analysis shows that the ecological restoration resulting from these projects can provide long-term economic benefits that far exceed project cost, in addition to the initial economic stimulus. Averaging the benefit-cost ratios across the three restoration projects studied, each dollar invested by taxpayers returns more than $15 in net economic benefits. Society has long recognized that physical capital such as factories and roads can create value for the economy through the production of goods and provision of transport. The full report shows that reefs, estuaries, and other wetlands represent natural capital that also provides long-term support for economic activity. These ecological assets continue to generate value over time for critical coastal industries, including commercial and recreational fishing, real estate, recreation, and tourism, as well as other benefits such as pollution filtration and protection against extreme weather and coastal flooding. The sum of these benefits—including both goods and environmental services—can far exceed the total investment needed to generate them. Investing in coastal restoration is good policy. It’s not just the right thing to do for the environment; it’s the right thing to do for coastal communities, vulnerable coastal populations, and the U.S. economy. Recommendations for future action
• Public and private sector entities should increase their investment in coastal restoration projects and fund ongoing monitoring of restored areas.
• Congress should enact and fund the National Endowment for the Oceans to provide a steady revenue stream for restoration.
• The state and federal agencies distributing BP oil spill related funds should invest in recovery projects that create employment and support long-term ecosystem recovery.
• Federal, state, and local coastal planners should give greater weight to natural solutions such as wetland restoration to help protect at-risk developed areas.
• The Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of the Interior, and NOAA should work with the Economic Development Administration and the U.S. Department of Labor to develop new pathways into crafts, trades, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, careers related to ecosystem restoration.
• NOAA and its partners should seek funding to apply the evaluation techniques used in this report to the other ARRA coastal restoration projects in order to provide a stronger foundation for future coastal land use decisions.
2nd – Best studies indicate plan can reduce casualties by half. Ocean policy is key
Conathan, et al, Center for American Progress, April 2014 [The Economic Case for Restoring Coastal Ecosystems, By Michael Conathan, Jeffrey Buchanan, and Shiva Polefka April 2014, WWW.AMERICANPROGRESS.ORG]
As then NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco put it, “Storms today are differ- ent. Because of sea-level rise, [Sandy’s] storm surge was much more intense, much higher than it would have been in a non-climate changed world.”78 Sea-level rise is also driving an increase in the frequency and intensity of destruc- tive coastal floods. According to a September 2013 report from the American Meteorological Society, sea-level rise caused by global warming is significantly reducing the time between major coastal flood events.79 In 1950, the more than 8-foot-high storm surge caused by Sandy in New Jersey would have been considered a once-in-435-years event. But given the accelerating rate of sea-level rise, scientists now predict that Sandy-scale flooding will occur there every 20 years by 2100.80 The problem is not going away any time soon. Scientists warn that global green- house gas emissions have already locked in a significantly greater risk from coastal hazards such as storms and flooding. Even if we cease emitting fossil-fuel-based greenhouse gases today, sea levels will continue to rise for the next several centu- ries. According to the geologic record, the last time the atmosphere was as carbon rich as we have made it today, seas were 20 meters higher.81 Our increasing economic dependence on our coasts and the greater risks they face from climate change and sea-level rise mean that any discussion of coastal land use must address the question of how we reconcile these conflicting trends. In other words, how do we affordably adapt our coasts so that our coastal com- munities, assets, and infrastructure become safer and more secure, while also continuing to invest in the coastal ecosystem restoration needed to ensure that our coasts are ecologically healthy? Research, especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, has revealed that healthy coastal ecosystems play a vital role in reducing risks from coastal hazards. First, as mentioned in the previous section, coastal wetlands with healthy plant com- munities, such as salt marshes, mangroves, and estuaries, serve as highly effective buffers against storm surge. These ecosystems soak up and hold floodwaters similar to a sponge and shield landward areas from inundation. Estimates of the hurricane pro- tection value of existing coastal wetlands in the Gulf and eastern seaboard have shown that the absence of healthy coastal ecosystems explains as much as 60 percent of the damage suffered by communities along the Gulf Coast that are struck by hurricanes. The researchers concluded that “coastal wetlands function as valuable, self-maintain- ing ‘horizontal levees’ for storm protection ... their restoration and preservation is an extremely cost-effective strategy for society” to mitigate the damage from tropical storms.82 These studies found that the Gulf Coast’s remaining coastal wetlands pro- vide around $23.2 billion per year in storm protection services. 83 More recently, scientists have begun to account for future trends in sea-level rise and socioeconomic data in their examination of the relationship between healthy coastal ecosystems and the most vulnerable members of society—primarily the poor, communities of color, and the elderly. A new body of research on social vul- nerability, led by organization such as the University of South Carolina’s Hazard Vulnerability Research Institute, combines data on physical risk with social and economic data sets.84 This robust literature explains how socioeconomic dynamics contribute to com- munities facing greater challenges in responding to, recovering from, and prepar- ing for climate-related hazards.85 Researchers from Stanford University and The Nature Conservancy overlaid a map of coastal wetlands with data on the spatial distribution of individuals most likely to be harmed or killed during catastrophic storm events. Then, they modeled several scenarios in which sea-level rise and coastal ecosystem degradation continue at current rates. Relative to the most likely scenarios, the scientists reported in Nature Climate Change that: The likelihood and magnitude of losses may be reduced by intact reefs and coastal vegetation, especially when those habitats fringe vulnerable communities and infrastructure. The number of people, poor families, elderly and total value of residential property that are most exposed to hazards can be reduced by half if existing coastal habitats remain fully intact.86
3rd Ending zones of sacrifice reasserts the political voices of those lives currently rendered unlivable. The affirmative adapts to the inevitable impacts of climate change in order to preserve critical infrastructure based on notions of shared public space and the need for new democratic possibilities, undermining the neoliberal consensus that certain lives can be calculated into irrelevance.
Giroux, in ‘12 Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, [Henry, “Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13025-hurricane-sandy-in-the-age-of-disposability#XXXVI]
Within this regime of neoliberal violence, the politics of disposability is shored up by the assumption that some lives and social relationships are not worthy of a meaningful social existence, empathy and social protections. Lacking social protections, such populations increasingly are addressed within the growing reach of the punishing state, as a source of entertainment, or are relegated to what Etienne Balibar calls the "death zones of humanity," where they are rendered superfluous and subject to a mode of "production for elimination."9 In a culture defined by excessive inequality, suffering and cruelty, the protective covering of the state, along with the public values and the formative culture necessary for a democracy is corrupted.10 And the disposable are not merely those populations caught in extreme poverty. Increasingly, they are individuals and groups now ravaged by bad mortgages, poor credit and huge debt. They are the growing army of the unemployed forced to abandon their houses, credit cards and ability to consume - a liability that pushes them to the margins of a market society. These are the groups whose homes will not be covered by insurance, who have no place to live, no resources to fall back on, no way to imagine that the problems they will be facing are not just personal, but deeply structural, built into a system that views the social contract and the welfare state as a lethal disease.
A callous indifference to the plight of the poor was made clear in the remarks of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney in his derogatory reference to the 47 percent of adult Americans who don't pay income taxes for one reason or another as "people who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."11In a post-election comment, Romney reproduced this logic when telling a group of his financial backers that Obama won the election because he gave policy gifts to specific interest groups, "especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people."12 In this instance, Romney simply affirmed Newt Gingrich's more overtly racist claim that President Obama was a "food stamp president ... who was comfortable sending a lot of people checks for doing nothing."13 Right-wing pundits such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Sean Hannity, offered up additional examples of the discourse of disposability and culture of cruelty by claiming that 47 percent "want things" and are welfare moochers and "wards of the state."14 In this economic Darwinist measure of value, those marginalized by race and class, who might detract from, rather than enlarge another's wealth are not only demonized, but are also viewed as problematic in that they become burdens to be disposed of, rather a valuable and treasured human resource in which to invest. But the discourse of disposability is not limited to right-wing politicians, pundits, conservative media apparatuses or a Republican Party that is now in the hands of extremists; it is also built into the vocabulary of liberal governmental policy.
This culture of cruelty and disposability was particularly visible as Mayor Michael Bloomberg initially was willing to divert scarce resources for storm relief such as food, power generators, police and fire personnel and public services to the New York Marathon rather than to the hardest hit victims of the killer hurricane, especially those residents in Staten Island. In the face of a public anger, Bloomberg eventually cancelled the event but not before he had made obvious the message that, as Chris Hedges points out, those who are poor and voiceless are expendable, "a drain on efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse ... have no voice and no freedom .... This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a world of barbarism."15 The ideology of hardness and cruelty unleashed by neoliberal policy formulations was further highlighted as a number of right-wing policy advocates who argued in various mainstream news sources that the destruction wreaked by Sandy provided an excellent opportunity for privatizing the Natural Flood Insurance Program and eliminating labor protections and other regulations that hampered the superrich from using the disaster to rake in big profits. In one brazen, if not ruthless, suggestion written by right-wing economist Russell S. Sobel in a New York Times online forum, he argued that in the most devastated areas caused by Hurricane Sandy, "FEMA should create 'free trade zones - in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended.' This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, 'better provide the goods and services victims need.'"16 This was somewhat at odds with an earlier suggestion by Mitt Romney that FEMA should actually be abolished in order to allow the private sector to take over disaster control.17
The lessons of Hurricane Sandy not only raise serious questions about the class and racial divides that characterize the United States and the seriousness of the ecological dangers that are reshaping weather patterns and destroying the globe, but also about forms of neoliberal power that escape any sense of moral responsibility and are answerable only to those who have power and seek profit at any cost. As neoliberalism spreads across the globe, there seems to be little that governments can do in fulfilling a broad central commitment to their citizens. This suggests that the American public become all the more attentive to what populations are dehumanized and considered excess, who is on the chopping block, who is being protected and who is being ignored. Zones of terminal exclusion, social death and what Hedges calls "sacrifice zones" are proliferating at a rapid pace in the United States.18 These are the forgotten zones of interminable exclusion and social abandonment where Americans are trapped in never ending cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and hopelessness as a direct result of neoliberal policies that embrace capitalistic greed, while producing "areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We're talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed."19
The growing legions of disposable populations cannot be separated from the ongoing attack by the apostles of neoliberalism on workers' freedoms, women's civil rights, public schools, the welfare state and other groups and institutions that get in the way of the extremely wealthy bankers, hedge fund managers and corporate CEOs who want to reshape America in the image of casino capitalism. America is awash in neoliberal culture of violence, which becomes all the more dangerous as the notion of moral conscience, like the notion of social agency, seems all but forgotten as moral obligations are reduced to the realm of self-obligations. Trapped in an unwillingness to translate private troubles into broader social considerations, the discourse of social protections is reduced to the vocabulary of charity and individual giving. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the overly washed elite have been discovering poverty while exoticizing the poor. Sarah Maslin Nir points critically to the elites' immersion into poverty porn by noting their "voyeuristic interest in the plight of the poor, treating [their trip into disaster areas] as an exotic weekend outing."20 She also notes the complaint of a female resident of a Rockaway project who stood by "as volunteers snapped iPhone photos of her as she waited in line for donated food and clothing."21 The message was not lost on her as revealed by her comment that she and her friends felt as if they were "in a zoo."22
Privatized discourses and a war-against-all ethos increase the likelihood of the disappearance of those considered disposable and are reinforced by a stripped-down notion of responsibility, which alleviates the weight of moral conscience and social obligations. It undermines and destroys, when possible, those modes of social agency, collective structures and bonds of sociality capable of holding power accountable, resisting the anti-democratic pressures of neoliberalism and imagining visions that prioritize an investment in the public good over visions of happiness characterized by an endless search for immediate gratification. In a society in which "markets are detached from morals" and a market economy is transformed into a market society, market values increasingly shape areas of everyday life where they do not belong.23 As markets provide the only template by which to address all of society's needs, money and expanding profit margins become the ultimate measure of one's worth, and consuming the ultimate index of what it means to invest in one's identity, relations with others and the larger society.
Social rights and nonmarket values no longer matter and consequently an increasing number of individuals and groups are removed from any kind of ethical grammar that would acknowledge those economic, political and social forces that produce their suffering and marginalization. Such groups are increasingly punished if they are homeless, poor, unemployed or in debt. Institutions once meant to abolish human suffering now produce it.24 Three strikes sentencing laws have "created a cruel, Kafkaesque criminal justice system that lost all sense of proportion, doling out life sentences disproportionately to back defendants."25 We are living through what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton rightly calls a "death-saturated age" in which matters of violence, survival and trauma inescapably saturate everyday life.26 Such anti-democratic forces are not new, but they have been intensified and deepened under expanding neoliberal policies. They have also been reconfigured in more powerful and lethal ways through a frontal assault on the social contract, the welfare state and social protections.27 Positive visions of the good society and the importance of public values and civic life are being destroyed under the dominance of regressive and reactionary neoliberal institutions, ideologies, values and social relations. Market fundamentalism is the driving force of our times and it has destroyed the formative culture, rules of law, economic institutions, public spheres and governing structures necessary for a democracy to survive.
Marginalized groups must appeal to the state, the alt creates violent backlash leading to nuclear war and genocide
Shaw 1, Martin, Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, The unfinished global revolution: intellectuals and the new politics of international relations,
Since ‘worldwide’, ‘international’ and ‘global’ are often held to mean the same thing, let me propose ways of distinguishing them. Worldwide relations connect people around the world: they cross boundaries but do not necessarily negate them.13 International relations are between national units of state and society. Global relations, in contrast, are based on the consciousness of living in a common social sphere. Their first form is the understanding that we share a common natural environment.The second is that we live in a highly interconnected world.14The third is that we share basic common values.Much argument fails to move beyond the first and especially the second of these meanings. However only with the recognition of all three elements has globality arrived at its fullest meaning, of human commonality.15 The roots of globality lie, therefore, in increasingly common world experiences. Globality is not, as commonly suggested, about how we all consume the same dross of worldwide commerce, Cokes and Big Macs. It is fundamentally about how experiences like world wars, the Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation have made us aware of the common fragility of human existence. It is about how standards of democratic accountability and human rights are coming to be seen not as exclusive preserves of rich Westerners, but entitlements of all. Out of these concerns has come a more concrete reinforcement of the universalistic tendency of modern thought, hitherto fundamentally compromised by the national rivalries of racially based Western empires. The growing sense of common values has informed global consciousness and institutions ever since the last major turning point in 1945, but it has been deformed up till now by the rivalries of Cold War blocs. It took the overthrow of the Cold War order, therefore, to turn this consciousness from an abstract into a more practical form. It is in this sense that the democratic revolution is now becoming global. Where people seek democratic change, they appeal in an increasingly concrete way to common standards and institutions. Many (if not all) who fight for accountability and freedoms at a national level now locate these ends within a global context: universal values and world political and legal institutions. Globality does not make the national or international redundant: indeed the nation, and its place in inter- national order, remains one of the universals to which marginalized groups appeal. However our understandings of the nation and international relations are beginning to be transformed by seeing them in a global context. International links and ‘cosmopolitan nations’16can then be seen as building blocks of globality. Some reject the idea of common global values because their expressions are mostly Western in origin. However, all world religions contain recognitions of human commonality. The attempt to assert that there is a ‘clash of civilizations’17, stronger than those things pulling us together, is not supported by worldwide evidence. Go to Teheran, first centre of the Islamic revolution: our counterparts in universities there are trying to connect to global, even Western, politics and culture. Go to Beijing, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur or Rangoon, and see whether students and academics will give up ideals of democracy and human rights for the ‘Asian values’ proclaimed by their rulers. Of course, people interpret common values in the contexts of nationality and religion, and they often have justified suspicions of Western leaders and world institutions. But none of this negates the strong drive towards commonality, which means that we can talk of the wave of global- democratic revolution. These points are not merely of abstract importance. They have a life-or-death meaning for many people in non-Western regions. If you are Timorese and have endured a quarter of a century of oppression, your national aspirations and global values are not divisible. The people who will tell you about national as opposed to Western values are those who will burn down your village, kill members of your family, and disregard your vote. The same is true, of course, for the Kosovo Albanians or the Iraqi Kurds. For the most oppressed peoples, like the student campaigners in the capital cities, the democratic revolution is framed within a global commonality of values.18 ….continued... The new politics of international relations require us, therefore, to go beyond the anti-imperialism of the intellectual left as well as of the semi-anarchist traditions of the academic discipline. We need to recognize three fundamental truths. CONTINUES …↓
CONTINUED FROM↑
First, in the twenty-first century people struggling for democratic liberties across the non- Western world are likely to make constant demands on our solidarity. Courageous academics, students and other intellectuals will be in the forefront of these movements.They deserve the unstinting support of intellectuals in the West.Second, the old international thinking in which democratic movements are seen as purely internal to states no longer carries conviction—despite the lingering nostalgia for it on both the American right and the anti-American left. The idea that global principles can and should be enforced worldwide is firmly established in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. This consciousness will become a powerful force in the coming decades. Third, global state-formation is a fact. International institutions are being extended, and (like it or not) they have a symbiotic relation with the major centre of state power, the increasingly internationalized Western conglomerate. Thesuccess of the global- democratic revolutionary wave depends first on how well it is consolidated in each national context—but second, on how thoroughly it is embedded in international networks of power, at the centre of which, inescapably, is the West. From these political fundamentals, strategic propositions can be derived. First, democratic movements cannot regard non-governmental organizations and civil society as ends in themselves. They must aim to civilize local states, rendering them open, accountable and pluralistic, and curtail the arbitrary and violent exercise of power. Second, democratizing local states is not a separate task from integrating them into global and often Western-centred networks. Reproducing isolated local centres of power carries with it classic dangers of states as centres of war.84 Embedding global norms and integrating new state centres with global institutional frameworks are essential to the control of violence. (To put this another way: the proliferation of purely national democracies is not a recipe for peace.) Third, while the global revolution cannot do without the West and the UN, neither can it rely on them unconditionally. We need these power networks, but we need to tame them too, to make their messy bureaucracies enormously more accountable and sensitive to the needs of society worldwide. This will involve the kind of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’argued for by David Held.85It will also require us to advance a global social-democratic agenda, to address the literally catastrophic scale of world social inequalities. This is not a separate problem: social and economic reform is an essential ingredient of alternatives to warlike and genocidal power; these feed off and reinforce corrupt and criminal political economies. Fourth, if we need the global-Western state, if we want to democratize it and make its institutions friendlier to global peace and justice, we cannot be indifferent to its strategic debates. It matters to develop international political interventions, legal institutions and robust peacekeeping as strategic alternatives to bombing our way through zones of crisis. It matters that international intervention supports pluralist structures, rather than ratifying Bosnia-style apartheid.86 As political intellectuals in the West, we need to have our eyes on the ball at our feet, but we also need to raise them to the horizon. We need to grasp the historic drama that is transforming worldwide relationships between people and state,as well as between state and state. We need to think about how the turbulence of the global revolution can be consolidated in democratic, pluralist, international networks of both social relations and state authority. We cannot be simply optimistic about this prospect. Sadly, it will require repeated violent political crises to push Western and other governments towards the required restructuring of world institutions.87What I have outlined is a huge challenge; but the alternative is to see the global revolution splutter into partial defeat, or degenerate into new genocidal wars—perhaps even nuclear conflicts. The practical challenge for all concerned citizens, and the theoretical and analytical challenges for students of international relations and politics, are intertwined.
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